Germans Protest Radio-ID Plans

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Germans Protest Radio-ID Plans

Activists in Germany on Saturday will protest the use of radio-frequency IDs and various plans by businesses to track consumers. Their efforts already forced one of the largest retailers in Europe to back down this week from a trial run of the tags.

Led by German privacy organization FoeBud, activists in Rheinberg, Germany, plan to stage a protest outside the Metro Extra Future Store, a department store that serves as a site to test RFID tracking and other retailing technologies.

Metro AG, the store's parent company, is the world's fifth-largest retailer with more than 2,000 stores, including supermarkets and electronics stores in 28 countries.

Activists recently discovered RFID chips embedded in the store's customer loyalty cards. They also found them in products for sale there, including goods from IBM, Gillette and Procter & Gamble. Metro failed to notify customers that they were being tracked. Although Metro told activists the chips worked only while customers were inside the store, activists discovered that a kiosk used to deactivate the chips didn't completely disable the tags.

An RFID tag consists of a microchip the size of a grain of sand attached to an antenna that transmits information whenever it passes in front of an RFID reader. Product manufacturers and stores have expressed interest in placing the tags on consumer items to manage inventory, track consumer interest, speed checkout time and thwart thieves.

Critics say the tags would let businesses monitor the movement of citizens and collect information for marketing purposes. Information transmitted by the tags can be read up to 10 feet away.

Public outcry and the impending protest over the privacy violation at Metro forced the company to cancel its use of RFID tags in loyalty cards. The company announced Thursday it would cease embedding RFID chips in its loyalty cards and would replace cards that were already distributed to customers.

"This demonstrates the power of the free market at work," said Katherine Albrecht, director of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion, or CASPIAN, an organization based in the United States. "The world's people are telling global businesses ... that they won't tolerate being spied on through products and services."

Even with Metro's retreat, representatives from 14 privacy and civil rights organizations in Germany said they would proceed with the Saturday protest. Rena Tangens, founder of FoeBud, said the announcement didn't go far enough since the company and its product partners didn't agree to remove tags from products.

"We are asking Metro and its partners to comply with the terms of a position statement that calls for a moratorium on item-level product tagging," he said. They also want Metro and its partners to fund research that would examine the privacy problems associated with using RFID technology.

Albrecht, who has a degree in business administration and international marketing, said there are legitimate uses for the tags but questions the "benefit of getting through the checkout line five minutes faster at a cost to civil liberties."

Metro is not the first company to face controversy over the use of RFID tags.

Italian clothing manufacturer Benetton Group ran into trouble last year when it announced plans to tag its clothing labels with RFID chips. The company shelved the plan after consumers threatened a boycott.

Newspapers reported last year that the European Central Bank was planning to embed RFID chips into the fibers of bank notes by 2005 to thwart counterfeiters. Activists have expressed concern that the chips would record when and where monetary transactions occur, destroying the anonymity that cash payments usually provide.

More commonly, libraries have been using RFID tags to track books, speed up checkout time and help them make purchasing decisions. But last year, Japanese bookstores announced plans to embed books with tags linked to surveillance cameras. A store could observe a consumer's browsing habits by noting the books they peruse and the pages they linger on.

"That becomes extremely disturbing in light of the Patriot Act," Albrecht said, referring to provisions in the U.S. anti-terrorism act that allow government agencies to access library records.